The Seas of Ramion

The Seas of Ramion by Frank Hinks is another of the Ramion collection of books.

The wicked witch Griselda is exhausted. Witching really takes out out of a person!

Her faithful servant Boris the skull realises that Griselda needs a holiday to enable her to recharge her
Boris wants her to take a trip to the beaches of Southern France, but Griselda doubts that this is a good idea. Because she suspects that all Boris would do would be to eye up the girls.

Instead it is decided that they will holiday at a castle owned by her cousin Veronica, Morgan Castle in Pembrokeshire, in Wales.

But first she must cast a spell to cause the holiday plans of some children to be changed.

She wants the boys to also holiday at Morgan Castle so that she can eat them.

But who will protect the boys if Snuggle, their cat protector, is at home being looked after by Mrs Dean?

But when Griselda arrives at the castle, she finds it very disappointing. Her cousin is wearing a lovely dress and all of the instruments of torture have disappeared from the castle! What has happened to Veronica? Could Griselda's magical spell have had some totally unexpected, nice, outcomes?

 Are her plans to eat brothers Julius, Alexander and Benjamin about to come to fruition? Or will the plans be thwarted? But as the feline Snuggle is the one person who can deal with Griselda, how can the brothers be saved?

The boys accidentally enter the undersea realm of the King of the Merpeople and find that it has been taken over by a wicked stepmother.

They learn what happens to shipwrecked sailors and what fate befell the legitimate Queen. But can the three boys really save the undersea kingdom from the usurper and escape from the clutches of Griselda?

Or will Snuggle the cat be able to save the day?

And does Boris the good skull finally become evil?

This book is an ideal Christmas present for children of all ages and the quirky humour will be enjoyed by adults, too. It is very well illustrated and is published by Perronet books in hardback.

You can buy it via the That's Books and Entertainment online bookshop, available to the righthand side of this review.

Jungle Jim and the Shadow of Kinalabu

It's a good life for James Regent. He is an ice hockey star. Yet he decides that he will set off for the jungles of Borneo in search of adventure and lost love.

It all began when Jim receives a tattered map through the post and with it a plea for help from someone her cares deeply about. Ruthie.

So, Jim sets off for Borneo and is struck by a curse from some very terrifying Iban Headhunters.

The result of the curse is that whenever the moon is orange, Jim transmogrifies into an 8 foot tall orangutan with super powers!

Jim is, in fact, a weangutan, rather than a werewolf.

But Jim is no monster. Instead Jim has become an ancient protector of not only the land of Borneo but of the world beyond.

The reader is taken immediately into a very exciting and nerve tingling adventure as Jim, assisted by his best friend, Rufus, battle to save Ruthie. And perhaps even the whole Universe, let alone the world!

There are the Iban Headhunters, the evil forces of the Shadow Emperor. Actually, he shouldn't even be in our universe, he had been dragged here by the reckless Dark Matter experiments of a rather bonkers scientist called Dr Gila.

They have taken over an abandoned top secret US government laboratory hidden way beneath Mount Kinabalu.

Jungle Jim, Rufus and a ragtag band of colleagues and friends must battle against the Dark Matter Shadow Army, if they are to save the world.

But all is not what it seems. Fighting against trans-dimensional baddies whilst you are trying to survive the depredations of the flora and fauna of the jungle is perhaps a little bit more adventurous than you might need!

Described as "Indiana Jones meets the Incredible Hulk" this book is suitable for child from nine to 109 and it really must be in the Christmas stocking of anyone who loves a good adventure yarn. So if you have a lot of children to buy presents for, make sure each of them gets a copy of this fantastically adventurous and wonderfully quirky book.

It's published by Matador at a very reasonable £8.99 and is available from all good bookshops, including the Thats Books and Entertainment book shop, which you'll find to the right of this review.

The Lanes Also Remember

The Lanes Also Remember is part of a series of poems by Tristram Cooke.

As well as being a poet, Tristram Cooke was educated at Westminster School and also at Trinity College, Oxford.

He worked as a language teacher (majoring in Spanish) for nearly 40 years.

He lives with his girlfriend Mariacruz and her family in Mexico.

The poems are stripped back and bare. Yet the humour of the poet usually shines through.

Their style is refreshingly simplistic and is strikingly reminiscent of the art works of Grandma Moses, one of America's best-known folk artists.

Tristram Cooke's poems cover a wide range of topics from love and lust to conflicts, from friendships to the legacies that our parents leave us.

Incidentally, your reviwer's favourite is to be found on page 23.

All 20 of the poems are all stunningly illustrated with exquisite paintings by Valentina Cherneva-Cherry.

It is published by BARS-AGENCY and is available in the UK through Troubadour Books.

It is available via The Thats Books and Entertainment bookshop at £4.99.

Caravan

Caravan is a new novel by Cassandra Keen.

It is a gripping read as it takes the reader through a journey of blame, retribution, revenge, love and hatred.

Lucien was many different things to many different people.

To some he was a difficult young man.

To others he was a victim. To others he was merely disaffected.

But Ruth, his stepmother, knew the real Lucien. And she despised what he truly was.

She decided to confront him at his caravan.

His death when the caravan burst into flames was witnessed by Ruth.

She remained silent about what she witnessed, perhaps scared that she might be blamed for the tragedy.

Ruth decides to holiday by herself on the island of Malta.

But is she truly alone? Or is Lucien with her? A ghostly, ghastly presence, haunting her, being a rather more destructive ghost than most?

After his death it seems that Lucien presents a larger version of himself than he ever did in his life.

But there are forces at work that are pulling Ruth's life apart. What exactly is Lucien's birth mother, Morgana up to? And where does Paul, Ruth's husband and Morgana's ex, fit in with all this?

What of the two children that she has with Paul?

And what of the ghosts from Ruth's own past?

Could she, would she be alright?

This is a very compelling book and a real bargain at £8.99 from Matador.

It will make a good stocking filler and is available via the Thats Books and Entertainment bookshop, which is to the right of this review.

Disclosure: The Future is Now

Disclosure: The Future is Now is a new sceince fiction novel by novelist and scientist Dr Graham Clingbine.

Dr Clingbine has a BSc and an MSc form the University of London in Biological Science and Neuroscience.

He has brought his considerable technical expertise to create a taut and compelling science fiction thriller.

The novel follows the life of Kevin Powell from his eight summer when we find him living with his mother, Sylvie.

As a young child he is subject to a a variety of unusual experiences that his youthful mind cannot comprehend or understand, trey as he might. He logically presumes that they are just a normal part of growing up and that everyone must go through the same experiences.

When he becomes a teenager, his mother falls prey to poor health and it is now Kevin's turn to look after her.

But all is not as it seems. His mother requires surgery to remove an object from her body. What is it? Where is it from? What was its purpose? Nobody knows.

However, Kevin knows that he has seen this before. When he was a child of eight.

By the time Kevin enters adulthood, he again falls victim to visions that seem to be realistic, yet also nightmare-like.

He sees a depopulated Earth, a vision from the future of his home world.

He loves his daughter, yet would he be able to sacrifice that love should it impinge on the future of planet Earth?

What, exactly, does Kevin's mother know? And where is his father?

The book relies heavily on Dr Clingbine's research into UFO sightings and the like.

Incidentally the latter portion of the book is made up of accounts of alien abductions, UFO sightings and the like.

It costs £9.99 and is published by Matador and is available from the That's Books and Entertainment bookshop.

Know Your Onions

Know Your Onions by Allan Goodbrand is the kind of book that I like and which are always good to find in your Christmas stocking.

It is described as a "light-hearted look at popular idioms and sayings" and that is exactly what this book is.

If you always wondered why a hat trick is called a hat trick, why a red herring means something that distracts us from our goal, why our bacon is saved, why your timbers might be shivered, what the Whole Nine Yards is, why we go from pillar to post, why it is a dime a dozen, who was Bob and whose uncle was he and what is a Dog Day of Summer?

Allan gives explanations for each phrase in  the book and offers alternative explanations to the origin of a saying referenced to in  the book should there be multiple explanations for the origins  of a phrase or saying.

The book is written in an amusing, conversational tone and is ideal for either reading straight through or for dipping into multiple times after Christmas dinner and before the Queen's Christmas speech.

This book is an ideal Christmas present for people of any and all ages and is published at £9,99 by the Book Guild. It is available through the That's Books and Entertainment bookshop, links to which are to be found on the righthand side of this review.

In Fidelity

In Fidelity is a new novel by Jack Wilson, it covers a period from the 1950s to the late 1970s.

In it we meet Christine, an attractive and vivacious wife and mother who is greatly loved by her children and, of course, by her husband, Dick.

Unfortunately Christine falls victim to a cancer that attacks and ravages her beautiful face.

It steals her good looks from her when the surgeons who worked to save her life had to remove her left jaw and part of her mouth.

Dick no longer finds her attractive. He falls for the temptations of the wife of a friend, a very close friend, and Dick takes the coward’s way out by fleeing from his family and his old life by leaving home to teach law in Africa.

He then meets an attractive woman who, like Dick, has also fled from her own past life.

But secrets have a nasty tendency to turn up when they are least expected. And past actions always seem to come back to haunt one, often with a terrible price to pay.

This novel is very well written and thoughtful book that contains some rather painful glimpses into the lives of ordinary people when they react to extraordinary events, or, sometimes, when they fail to react to them in quite the way that perhaps they should.

It is published by Matador at £10.99 and is available via the That’s Books and Entertainments bookshop, to the right of this review.

It will make an ideal Christmas present for the reader who likes their novels thoughtful and with meaning.